Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One

by M. Scott Carter

  If it sounds like we’re showing off, we’re not, we’re just extremely proud when authors we were lucky enough to ‘discover’ go on to be successful.

  Something Wicked started life as a 3am flash of inspiration. It arose out of two impulses. The first was that Joe had been a fan of the genre his whole life, and finally got fed up with waiting for a South African answer to the Interzones and Cemetery Dances, which, in the bad old days, took anywhere from three months to a year to arrive at the local newsagents. More significantly though, no one was showcasing South African writers (or illustrators) in this genre, and exciting things were starting to happen, or really, at that stage, threatening to happen.

  Tired of waiting for someone else to make it happen, Joe decided to wade in and get his hands dirty. ‘How hard can it be?’ he reasoned. Well, as it turns out, very.

  Over the past six years, the publication has undergone several mutations. Something Wicked started out as a print quarterly featuring 10 to 13 stories per issue, or around 60 000 words, including feature articles, interviews and reviews. We put out ten exquisitely illustrated paper editions (nine of which are still available on our website) before print costs doubled and financial pressures forced us into hibernation. Wailing about the odds and snivelling into your sleeve is only fun for so long though, and one morning, Joe announced that we’d be going digital. I stopped gnawing on my arm for long enough to say, “Grnnph.” Which translates roughly as, “What a delightful idea. Which third-world country will you be plundering for slaves this time?” After clarifying that the ‘staff’ would indeed once again be ‘volunteered’ from our own little corner of sunny South Africa, Joe got to work. The new incarnation saw four stories a month, accompanied by author interviews and the odd non-fic piece, manifest as if by magic on the Something Wicked website. Then one morning, Joe came in looking glum. We fed him sugar and regressed him under hypnosis and eventually it all came out. It was the smell. He couldn’t live without it, you see. “Aah. Of course…,” we nodded sagely. He cracked open a book and sniffed deeply. “Ink!” he pronounced. He’d even brought us our very own set of personalised Something Wicked leg-irons. How could we say no?

  Perhaps the best part of our journey here has been the attention and respect our little passion project has garnered over the years. To some extent, it’s been a right-place, right-time thing and thanks to a handful of inspired, talented, hard-working South African writers, there’s some fabulous SF and horror that is suddenly getting heaps of international attention.

  So here we are, in your grubby little paws, all shiny and inky and papery, just itching to keep you up nights. Volume one features 24 speculative stories from every corner of the globe. We hope you like it and stick around for our new journey.

  - Vianne

  Illustration by Vincent Sammy

  “Silver City & The Green Place”

  SILVER CITY & THE GREEN PLACE

  by Abi Godsell

  Margery Fallows leant on an omnitree, watching the Project. From here, she could almost mistake it for an ordinary teenage girl in a wheelchair. It glanced up at the whipping leaves, hauling its chair along the path with calloused palms, arm muscles corded and bulging beneath the scars. An ordinary teenage girl, maybe a little outdoorsy, who’d caught a lot of sun. The face was tanned beneath a ragged thatch of hair beginning to bleach an even paler blonde. A careless girl, perhaps, stained brown and red with dirt and juice. It was only when it started moving, reaching long, strong arms up to pluck another pomegranate, that you could tell it wasn’t human. The pomegranate came free of the branch with a snap. The omnitree’s gleaming leaves rattled, then kept rattling, drummed by the tiny fingers of the first of the afternoon rain.

  “Your Project is one of a kind, Doctor Marlowe.” Margery smiled, glancing up at the gathering storm clouds. “What made you choose a living human body to house the Artificial Intelligence that you and your team developed?”

  The Doctor took a biscuit and examined it in the strange, heavy light filtering down from the overcast sky that always preceded the Thursday thunderstorms. He replied carefully. “Well, we needed a way to teach them. The AIs, I mean. There was no other way they’d ever understand us. Not without experiencing human. What’s the point of an AI if we can’t communicate with it? We’re certainly not smart enough to adapt to their frame of reference. We needed to find a way to teach them ours. A body with anencephaly, death of the higher brain but retention of all the other life processes, was perfect.”

  “The Matheson problem. Of course,” she interjected quickly, before he could start to lecture. “How do you speak to a mind that has evolved and only ever existed in a mainframe? You’re not the first, I believe, to propose this ‘immersion’ solution, but both Proxenos and Khumalo rejected the ‘Human-Casing’ as invalid, saying it produced only corrupted results. What makes this Project different?” Privately, Margery thought that Khumalo at least had rejected the solution because of the public outcry over it. That was before the days of Sci-Reg though, so the records weren’t really definitive.

  Marlowe shrugged, relaxing a little as the conversation turned to his areas of expertise. “ I think it was a case of sour grapes. Mostly, Proxenos and Khumalo just didn’t have the technology that we do. They couldn’t even have attempted the transplant surgery. So they cobbled together some theoretical reason why it wasn’t valid. Even for us, it was intensely complicated, fusing her mainframe with the lower brain, linking every vessel, every synapse and, of course, keeping the body alive. But we managed it. The team and I - this was before the others left - the team and I were proud of that.”

  “The name we have on record here is Kore. May I ask why?” The letters flashed in capitals across the identification photo Margery held on her pocket-screen. The photo was regulation, taken, so the records showed, just after the Project first became aware. It showed two nurses raising her arms above her head while she sagged, naked and bleary-eyed, with a hospital crew-cut, between them. Margery frowned. This application of the photograph regulations made her uncomfortable. Even if the Project was just a machine, the casing at least deserved better.

  “Kore was my suggestion.” The Doctor’s voice was distant. “We wanted something to show that she was ground-breaking.”

  “So you named her after one of the Greek goddesses?”

  The Doctor shook his head, “Not just any Greek goddess. We named her after Persephone, deity of spring and new life. Kore was her other name. It means Maiden. As in first.”

  Margery stared at the uniform hanging on her cupboard door. The crisp Regulator’s grey gleamed in the first rays of the morning light, hardly showing the months of disuse. There was dust on her hat. She blew it off and coughed. She needed to stop in at the office for new gloves; the blood hadn’t come out of the last pair. That was the problem with white. She sat down hard on the bed. She’d been trying not to think about the blood. Unbidden, guilt slammed into her, fresh as if the incident had happened yesterday. She should’ve seen it coming. She was head of AI and Robotics for fuck’s sake. Memories bubbled up next, seething and painful. The robot had had red enamelled sides. Red because the child had liked red. Blood comes off enamel really easily. She should have seen it coming. A Central Directive violation is a Central Directive violation, no matter how trivial it seems. Pressing the hat to her chest, she thought about cancelling today’s Project Appraisal.

  The Doctor’s omnitrees were bright in the afternoon light and heavy with pomegranates.

  Glass clinked and Margery tore her eyes away from the Project to see the Doctor carrying a tray.

  “You have to find a way to save her.” Trembling slightly, he set one of the glass cups in front of her.

  “Alistair, you know our friendship has no bearing on the interview today. I’m a Regulator; I can’t do anything less than my job.” Her eyes were gentle.

  He took a deep breath and spread hands knotted with arthritis on the table. “Of course Marge, of course. It’s just…”


  Margery put her hand on his. Hers was still smooth, where his was weathered. He’d been one of her first-year lecturers. “The fact that you even qualify for a second interview means there’s a chance your Project could be approved.”

  “There’s the Central Directive contravention though…”

  The Regulator smiled at him reassuringly. “Sure, the Central Directive. But the full wording is: If any non-human pseudo-sentience, regardless of Turing status, exhibits behaviour not predictable by its initial design or coding, that Project must immediately be terminated… except at the discretion of a qualified Regulator.” She turned away sharply and pretended to dig in her bag for something, resting her fingers on the small, slightly warm bump under the skin of her wrist. It was still green. “That’s why I’m here, Al. I’ll make the right call on this, don’t you worry.” I’ll make the call with my gut, the safe call. I’ll make the call I should have made with the last Appraisal. But outwardly she smiled at him again. “Shall we get going?”

  “You were telling me about Proxenos and Matheson.”

  “Yes… see, around that time, Gerriety was doing a lot of writing and she argued very strongly that ‘human’ could never be just a casing. Turns out, she was right.”

  Margery blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “She…” the Doctor indicated the construct wheeling itself jerkily across the lawn. “Kore, the Project… she cried once.”

  Margery turned her eyes to the garden. A few kamikaze raindrops - the afternoon storm’s isolated vanguard - spotted the ground before being swallowed by the dry earth. “Go on.”

  He swallowed and steepled his fingers. “We were watching a film. ‘Human movies’ she calls them. Even now. At least, I think that’s the translation. Anyway, I had to leave the room, can’t remember why, and the next thing I knew she was screaming. I didn’t think, I just ran. She’d fallen out of her chair. She could hardly move then. She’s better now, but I doubt she’ll ever walk.” He paused. “I… tried to pick her up, see what had happened. And she just clung to me. She clung to me and she was, well, crying. Crying uncontrollably, like a scared little girl. A scared human girl.” He lifted his head to the garden and his eyes softened. “I sort of, tried to pick her up off the ground, but I couldn’t lift her. So I just...” He looked lost suddenly. “I’ve never had children.” Margery was quiet. She could see them, the old man, struggling to hold it, this machine he had built into the body of a young woman. A young woman’s body is heavy. He’d known that he would probably never be able to lift it, but he’d tried. He must have been afraid, he who had never had children. But the Project wasn’t a child. She couldn’t let Al’s feelings for it sway her decision. The creator of the red enamelled robot had loved it too.

  “Why was it crying, Doctor?”

  “You can call her she. She’s female, even if she isn’t human. I think that she has a lot less control than she pretends sometimes. Control over the body I mean. There’s still so much we don’t understand about memory.” He sipped his coffee and continued. “I saw her crying and shaking and cringing away from the screen and I realised that she hadn’t just fallen from her chair; she’d been trying to get out of it. There was a train wreck, you see, in the film.” He paused a moment. “The body donor was on the 147.”

  The 147. Margery’s father had been a skytrain engineer. Anyone who knew anyone even remotely involved with skytrains remembered the 147.

  “The accident. Head on collision, derailment, no….” She gasped suddenly, catching his meaning. “No survivors.”

  “If I were looking for a trauma so great that it imprinted onto the most basic, most primitive regions of the brain, I wouldn’t look much farther than that.”

  “Surely it’s far too early to say something like that? There’s no theoretical backing... forgive me Doctor, but don’t you think it’s a little unlikely?” The Doctor sat back and looked away.

  “That’s what she said too, when I suggested the donor’s memory. But it would happen sometimes. At first it terrified her, suddenly operating totally inexplicably like that.”

  “Of course. The chance of recurrence is practically zero, so there’s no use in being scared. She- the Project would see it as inexplicable, pointless, but for us… Well, it’s always been our irrationalities that make us human.”

  It was a while before the Doctor continued.

  Margery helped herself to one of his biscuits. They were good, soft and spicy.

  “Soon enough though, she adapted to that too. It was simply interaction with the learned responses of the donor body, of course. We guessed that might happen and worked a bridge function into her programme. Otherwise it would just have driven her crazy.”

  “Well, I’m glad it didn’t.” Involuntarily, Margery remembered the twisted limbs and pools of blood that the Decommission and Containment team had collected in four white plastic buckets. She’d had her fill of crazy Projects for this year.

  “Margery Fallows, sit still.”

  “I can’t do this, Robyn. I’m not qualified for this! Not after what happened with that Minder ‘bot!”

  “You’re the head of AI and Robotics, Marge. This Project is the first real AI we’ve ever regulated. You’re the only one qualified for this. Now stop squirming.” The tall medical officer pushed Margery back into the chair and began rolling up her sleeve.

  Margery twisted out of her grip, anguish in her voice. “I can’t do this! I’ve got two deaths on my record. Besides, the Interviewee taught me at university. That disqualifies me on conflict of interest.”

  Robyn recaptured her wrist and stuck a small hypodermic into it. She held it there a few seconds until something pinged. “There. Not as painful as you were expecting. Look, shit happens Marge. You’re only human. Nobody’s perfect.

  “There were signs.”

  She snorted. “Please! Water got into its motherboard and drove it crazy. Nothing in the design indicated the possibility. You couldn’t have seen it coming.”

  She brought her wrist up to her face to examine the small tingling bump under her skin. “I did though. Something about it, about the plans, about the whole damn thing. It was nothing I could put into words just... It didn’t feel right. My gut knew. If I’d just listened…” The bump began to flash red.

  “See that? That’s the bead working. It can measure that you’re upset, see? It won’t let you make decisions while you’re upset.”

  Margery inspected her wrist. “And you’re sure that I’m authorised one?”

  Robyn shrugged. “Well there’s no rule against using them. They’re pretty new. I don’t think any of the other Regulators even know about them. There’s no use policy or guideline document or anything because I don’t think that they’re even in the system yet. Now get your butt out of my office and off to work or you’ll be late.”

  “Robyn...”

  “It’s okay Marge, relax. With this thing, you won’t have to put it into words.”

  “On record. Appraisal interview number 839: Marlowe, AW PHD Artificial Intelligence, Regulator: Margery Fallows: H.O.D., Project code: Live. Status: Pending. Consent:…” She looked expectantly at the Doctor. He was watching the girl in the wheelchair squeak her way clumsily back to the centre of the grove. Margery cleared her throat.

  “Oh! Yes of course, forgive me. I, Doctor Alistair Marlowe, acknowledging the Post Central African Fallout Crisis Responsible Science Charter, and the ultimate authority of the Science Regulation Body, give consent for this interview.”

  “Confirmed. Beginning interview.”

  “Regulator Fallows, get your butt back into the office. We need you for an interview.”

  Her secretary’s voice echoed into the room from her pocket-screen in the corner. Margery didn’t move from her seat in the sun where she was trying to knit. “Impossible, Harry. I was assigned three weeks’ trauma leave. I’ve barely had two.”

  “Tricia forwarded it. She asked that it go to you direct. She also resig
ned.”

  Margery dropped three stitches. “Shit.”

  “I know,” Harry replied. “She was a really good Regulator. It’s true AI you know.”